WASHINGTON—To fight back against corporate repression and political discrimination, communities of color should wield their mass political and especially economic clout against those officeholders who espouse white nationalism and against corporations and the elite that follow them.
Whether those recommendations by two panels, one on politics and the other on economics, at the legislative conference of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) succeed remains to be seen. But “you can’t do it”–achieve equality and rights–“by yourself,” warned Margaret Huang of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The danger to rights is there, warned New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Plotkin.
“We don’t question the legitimacy of an election,” he said, not naming who—Donald Trump—does. “If that is no longer the case, we’re no longer talking about a president. We’re talking about a king.”
There’s no question the economic potential is there, too. Latinos are now the largest population of color in the U.S., surpassing African-Americans, speakers said. Combine them with other communities of color—Asian-Americans, Native Americans—and the U.S. will become a minority-majority country, between 2042-2045, the Census Bureau projects. Seven states, plus D.C., already are minority-majority.
But while white nationalists try to disenfranchise communities of color, the economic impact of Blacks and Latinos is great: $7.5 trillion and rising, approximately 27% of U.S. gross domestic product.
“Growth demographically is important,” said Janet Murguia, president and CEO of UnidosUS, formerly the National Council of La Raza Unida. “Economic power is also important,”
It’ll be even greater in the future, Murgia said. She noted more than half of all U.S. K-12 classroom students—the leaders, workers and consumers of the nation’s future—are Black and/or Latino.
“In 2005, the gross domestic product of the Latino population was $1 trillion. Now it’s $3.7 trillion. If Latinos were a separate nation, they’d have the sixth largest GDP in the world…We need to leverage our economic power.” The GDP of African-Americans is slightly more than that of Latinos.
“Do they promote us?”
Southern Poverty Law Center President Margaret Huang said people of color should ask firms bidding for their business, “Do they promote our communities? Do they hire from our communities? Do they spend money in our communities? If they don’t, consider spending your money elsewhere.”
That’s especially important now, said economic panel moderator Stephen Benjamin, the former Mayor of Columbia, S.C., and a former top Obama and Biden administration White House aide.
“Every answer is not going to come from the government,” he said on March 11. “Sometimes your government is hurting you. We have to be strategic and tactical to improve lives, with dignity.”
The population growth scares the white nationalists, who have struck back via their leader, Republican President Trump, plus Trumpites in political office and suits in corporate suites. They’ve also approved, on the state level, a raft of repressive legislation curbing if not killing the right to vote of communities of color, women, LGBTQ people, workers, and other progressives, including religious progressives.
Trump also responded with an executive order to all federal offices abolishing all efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for communities of color and also for LGBTQ people and women, too, panelists noted. Major companies quickly followed.
The Associated Press list includes Amazon, Starbucks, Ford, GM, AT&T, Walmart, Warner Brothers/ Discovery, Meta, Google, Chipotle, Boeing, Disney, Citigroup, Bank of America, John Deere, Harley Davidson, McDonald’s, Paramount and the Smithsonian. When the Public Broadcasting System, which receives federal funding, closed its DEI section, all the staffers in it quit.
The firms dumped DEI policies and programs they reluctantly adopted during the Democratic Biden administration. Trump’s Pentagon symbolized the purge when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered deletion of 26,000 references to LGBTQ people, women and communities of color from its historical files. One ironic erasure: The name of the plane whose crew dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the Enola Gay. The word “gay” was the problem.
But while the percentage of people of color is rising in the U.S., gains mean little unless the power is flexed, said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest, largest civil rights group.
After all, as the last election showed, neither African-Americans nor Latinos are the political monolith the mainstream media, their oppressors and both major parties often stereotype them to be.
“Demographics is not destiny unless there is cohesion and a shared agenda,” said Johnson. “We were identified as cheap forced labor” he said of people of color “rooted in the history of those seeking to exploit us.
“There are those that want to divide us, separate us, and pit us one against the other.”
Familiar with such tactics
Workers are familiar with such tactics. Southern racists used—and the corporate elite still uses—racial divisions to halt organizing drives. So-called “right to work” laws began in Arkansas in 1944 when the elite there feared white and Black workers uniting for a common cause of better wages and working conditions. RTW is a corporate elite tool.
Another is to try to use a different racial group as strikebreakers, or scabs. Trump let loose a third repressive tactic: Having Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents gleefully raid plants and farms, rounding up anyone Black or brown, citizen or not, jailing and deporting hundreds if not thousands already.
In his first term, companies called Trump to send the ICE raiders to break up organizing drives at plants, especially meatpackers. And now he’s invented a new tactic, said NAACP’s Johnson: Diversion.
“Their game is to keep our attention over there,” he added, waving towards the end of the stage, via distractions, divisiveness and dictates “while they cut taxes to the advantage of the wealthy over here and around the globe. So we need to recognize how our uniqueness is being used against us” and strike back, economically as well as politically.
Politics plays a part in all this, a prior panel addressing the conference said. “We now live in a country where what [civil] rights you have depend on what state you live in,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin.
“Do you really think the president,” Trump, “should cut 75 million people from Medicaid? How about your state?” Platkin challenged.
He also mentioned Trump’s executive order, on his first day in office, decreeing the end of birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Though Platkin didn’t say so, that particular section was inserted in that post-Civil War measure to ensure the newly freed enslaved Black people of the South were guaranteed citizenship.
Trump tried to overturn the amendment with an executive order, but courts tossed that out. Other Republicans, notably Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., the #2 Republican on the Judiciary Committee and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, sneeringly call it “birthright citizenship” and introduced a bill to repeal it.
So communities of color must unite politically for their common good, the panelists said. Once again, that may be more easily said than done. One panelist pointed out there are divisions, based on national origin, between blocs of Hispanics, for example.
Even in Florida, home to a large Hispanic population, there is a split, one speaker said. On one side are “the Batista Cubans” who fled the 1959 revolution, and their descendants. On the other are other Cuban-Americans, especially an older, more-settled community around Tampa-St. Petersburg.
Communities of color should support each other politically to oust repressive officeholders, said Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford. His example: The attempt to revive the Equal Rights Amendment for ratification. Ford noted Virginia, the second to last state to ratify—too late, the Biden administration said—withdrew its consent after a new and Republican Attorney General entered the office four years ago.
“Do you want that?” Ford asked a questioner from the audience. “You have an election coming up this year. Elect somebody else!”
Veteran organizer Joe Henry, a national advisor on civic engagement for LULAC, strongly backs national economic action against exploiters.
“That’s what we did in 2020 during Covid, when the meatpacking workers were exploited,” he said in a telephone interview. “it was meatless May and it caused companies, especially Smithfield, a lot of consternation.” The www.boycottmeat.com website also shows support for that economic action, notably from animal rights groups, he said.
“When you take on a capitalist society, you need to be more than just in the streets.”
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